Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The Stimulus Bill Puts Your Health at Risk

Anybody who reads the Stimulus bill in detail should be really concerned about his or her health. Betsy McCaughey from Bloomberg read it and has a good summary. Here are a few of her points:

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill.

The stimulus bill calls [for a] Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. [Tom Daschle] praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system. Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis. In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye.